This from a woman who devours audio books, and gazes worshipfully at the shelves full of old paper books I have acquired an read throughout my adult life. I love to read, and I love books.

What I’ve realized here is that the situational reading format,not the ereader, is the most exciting thing going for readers. Just as TV fans demand their shows appear on a computer screen AND on the living room HD AND on the smartphone AND, though the thought horrifies me, on the DVD players in their cars, book readers like me are finding it possible to hope (if not demand, just yet) that text appear wherever and whenever. It hasn’t all come together in our minds the way it has for video addicts, but perhaps we’ll get there. Perhaps the cave-in to publishers that prevented Amazon’s Kindle from offering universal text-to-speech conversion will one day seem as laughable as an artist not providing digital versions of his or her music. Maybe my beloved old books; the novels I love to read in paper form, can coexist with the cocktail books and other recipe texts that should, in a just world, all be available via ereader. A girl can dream, can’t she?

As a non-regular TV watcher who reads a lot of tech blogs, I know that many people consume shows via Hulu, Netflix, and their DVRs. Given a lack of channel-surfing or exposure to a network’s show promos, how does one decide what TV shows to check out and follow? Same goes for music. If you’re not geeky enough about your tunes to read music blogs, and you don’t spend your nights at live shows, how do you come across and choose the stuff you want to download from Amazon, iTunes, and “other” sources?

The answer, as SM aficionados will gleefully tell you, is the kind of online word of mouth that social networks facilitate.

I guess.

What has me wondering about this theory is the multiple circles I tend to inhabit. Many of my online friends are self-described “geeks” and they talk about series like “Heroes” and “Big Bang Theory”. Based on their descriptions of these shows, I’ve never been inspired to check them out. The ironic hipsters of my acquaintance, many of whom are gay or “gay adjacent” (I so love that phrase) find joy in campy reality shows like “America’s Next Top Model” or “Real Housewives…” Nothing will ever convince me to watch. Fashion and shallow women are two of my least favorite things. And finally, my “NPR intellectual” friends, and the blogs and periodicals I favor, can’t stop talking about shows like “The Wire” and “Mad Men”. Well finally! I did check out the latter, mostly because of the “period” gimmick of setting the show in the past. And because “Mad Men” works pretty well as a soap opera, and partly as history adjacent, I kept watching.

It’s striking to me how little overlap there is. My geek/podcast friends have never mentioned “Mad Men”. And I don’t think Slate has any ongoing discussion threads about “Heroes”. It’s almost as if you need to choose, just as you might feel compelled to choose a political party, a clique in high school, or a neighborhood in which to live. The negative spin on that would be Balkanization. The positive might be “the long tail”. To me, it’s a mite weird.

So why, aside from a conscious intent to severely limit my TV consumption, do the passions of my friends leave me utterly cold? Am I more resistant than most people to peer influence? Am I so invested in my iconoclast self-image that I won’t succumb? The truth could be in there somewhere, but I also wonder if I simply require more and better evidence than word of mouth provides. I guess I don’t find links or two-minute YouTube clips very compelling. “What’s in it for me?” I wonder, when presented with an opportunity to engage myself with a continuing series? And the answer tends to come back that what’s in it for me would not extend very far beyond shared experience. And I can get that any day of the week by simply loading up Twitter, turning on a podcast, or god forbid, walking outside my house.

• iPhone 3.1, the “oh yeah, that” of yesterday’s Apple announcement, features a bunch of accessibility updates that make me extremely happy, and more likely to use accessibility on a regular basis. These are genuinely updates, not new features, but they are the kind of thing you get in a .1 release that shows Apple’s commitment to accessibility that is useful, not just window-dressing. I’ll have more to say on my next show, but the highlights include: the ability to toggle accessibility on and off easily, cut and paste support, VoiceOver access in Google Maps.
• I think Apple’s announcements yesterday will one day be viewed as the beginning of the end of the over-driven hype train that is the Apple product release cycle. Apple may well have many fantastic products ahead of it. I simply think that a growing number of observers are finding some perspective, and putting the events Apple hosts, and the products it produces into a more realistic context. As a professional curmudgeon, I think that’s a good thing, and will lead to better journalism and reviews, and perhaps even a little less irrational hatred.
• Democrats have (sensibly) been taking huge advantage of the opportunity presented by the whack job congressman who heckled the president’s speech last night. His 2010 opponent has raised a boatload of money. Before writing that check, will someone at least take the trouble to find out if he’s 1) a decent candidate 2) taken good positions on one or more Democratic issues? kthxbai.
• I’m no Sarah Palin fan. No. I’m not. But I have to say that if anyone else was managing to get the mileage she has from a couple of Facebook posts, they’d be anointed the next social media genius. This is especially relevant since, like most social media geniuses, Palin is currently without other gainful employment.

The iPod Touch, my beloved iPhone substitute, was released, and updated to version 2.0 in conjunction with other iPod announcements, not during iPhone launches. So even if we are to see a hardware-updated iPod Touch, it will most likely be a few months. This makes me sad, but I’m going to check out the iPhone 3.0 software update; hoping against hope that some accessibility features have found their way in there. I’m guessing they will not.

Checked out iPhone service pricing from AT&T. Having extended our existing phone contracts earlier this year when we replaced dead phones, switching would be an expensive proposition for me. I need someone to offer me a spectacular job, the perks of which include an iPhone. You know where to find me.

And since I’ve been paying more attention, I’m noticing the AT&T customer grumbling a lot more lately. When Bay Area tech pundits grumble, I tune them out, because I realize that they realize that their voices are loud and influential. It tends to make them sound whiny. But AT&T has network issues in many places. Friends in Atlanta have major issues. If I do jump to the iPhone, I’ll be borrowing one, and evaluating coverage in and around my home.

The fact remains that buying an iPhone, especially when paired with expensive, shoddy AT&T service, goes against a firmly held principle of mine. When you buy a consumer product, don’t allow yourself to become a sucker; so dependent upon overpriced, poor service, or exclusive terms that you cannot escape. I’m not sure how I’ll resolve that one for myself.

And rejoicing was heard in the land?

We’ll see what we’ll see.

The new phone, debuted at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, and due for release on June 19, includes a version of Apple’s VoicOver, the screen reader built into Mac OS X. Since we learned at its launch two years ago that the iPhone is an OS X device, lots of accessibility advocates, including me, have suggested that lighting up VoiceOver features in the phone was obviously doable. Now it’s happened.

Since I haven’t seen the phone, I can only report what Apple has told us about 3G S accessibility, and pose some questions. I’ll get the suspense over with right now, and tell you that after two years of resisting both the phone’s monthly cost, and lack of accessibility, I’m pretty eager to get one.

First off, let’s get our definitions straight. The iPhone 3G S will become available almost simultaneously with iPhone 3.0, a software release that works on both the new phone and existing iPhones and iPod Touch devices. VoiceOver, and another new feature with accessibility implications, Voice Control, require the iPhone 3G S. Though I haven’t confirmed this with Apple, I’m making an educated guess that the new features require the faster processor in the iPhone 3G S. iPhone 3.0, a free update for existing iPhone owners, and $9.95 for iPod Touch, does not appear to include specific accessibility enhancements. Apple has not announced any new iPod Touch hardware, so you’ll need to buy a phone to get VoiceOver and Voice Control.

Apple’s iPhone vision accessibility page touts VoiceOver as the same screen reader available in its Mac OS X computers. The accessibility toolbox also includes a couple of other options that are familiar to OS X users; zoom and white on black.

Apple uses the term “gesture” to refer to the many ways in which you tap, double-tap, drag, or pinch to use the touch screen. This nomenclature may not be familiar to blind users, for whom a tactile keyboard is the usual means of interacting with a screen reader. With VoiceOver turned on, the iPhone, whose glass screen is completely devoid of tactile reference points, save a button at the bottom, will speak the names of items over which a finger passes. Open the item with a double-tap, or use other gestures to manipulate it. Another detail for the uninitiated visually impaired user; the iPhone’s home screen does not contain the usual vertical menu of functions, but a grid with square icons representing your applications. Apple’s description touts contextual information provided in VoiceOver, and the freeform ability to interact with the screen reader. In a computer environment, screen readers deliver information in a specific order, as set out by navigation commands and arrow keys. On the iPhone, you can drag your finger to another part of the screen, getting audio feedback as you go. Speech rates and voices are customaizable. The device will even duck other audio, such as iTunes music, when VoiceOver is speaking

Like the innovative pinch gesture that makes it possible to zoom into and out of Web pages on an iPhone, the rotor, new in iPhone 3G S, appears to be an ingenious navigation aid that will make moving around, and keeping your place a lot easier for VoiceOver users. From Apple’s accessibility page: “Turning the rotor— by rotating two fingers on the screen as if you were turning an actual dial — changes the way VoiceOver moves through a document based on a setting you choose.For example, a flick up or down might move through text word by word. But when you choose the “character” setting, each time you flick up or down VoiceOver will move through the text character by character — perfect when you’re proofreading or editing text.”

The iPhone uses a virtual QWERTY keyboard. VoiceOver will speak text as you type it; letter by letter, or as you complete a word. It’s unclear to me how the software assists a blind user in finding virtual keys in the first place. That’s among the first features I’ll be testing.

VoiceOver speaks 21 languages, and Apple says you can activate it without sighted assistance, along with your iPhone.

Let me mention a few non-VoiceOver accessibility upgrades. I make extensive use of what Apple calls “white on black” in Mac OS X. I call it “reverse video”, but that seemed to confuse some of my Twitter followers yesterday. This feature inverts your screen, so that text is light and the video background is dark. This essential (to me) feature is part of iPhone 3G S, along with more flexibility in controlling font sizes, and zoom that is available outside Safari. On a Mac, reverse video can be toggled on and off with a keyboard shortcut (control-option-command-8, if you want to see what it looks like). I hope the iPhone also provides a quick toggle.

There is one major caveat about VoiceOver, and accessibility in general. While Apple has made these tools available, and implemented them in applications it ships with the iPhone, there is no guarantee that app developers will fully support accessibility. An app could, for example, be completely invisible to VoiceOver, or choose not to allow you to adjust its font size. In most cases, small developers will make these choices either because they simply don’t realize that they have visually impaired customers, or because they believe that the time required to implement accessibility is prohibitive. It’s going to be up to iPhone users and potential iPhone users to educate developers. I’m hoping to talk to a few, and learn how much work it is to implement Apple’s new goodies. While advocacy is important, it’s also a good idea to understand what challenges a developer faces in making an app accessible. I’ll let you know what I learn, though it’s safe to say that since the iPhone 3G S has just been announced, learning the ins and outs will take a little while. I intend to be persistent, but patient. And rest assured that each and every app reviewed on my App Store Pundit podcast will be evaluated based on its accessibility.

They are, in a very real sense, also selling themselves. Tools like podcasting, Twitter, Facebook, fan art and the like are the grassiest of grass roots, and the most personal of mass media. There can be no cooler use for what has come to be called social media. Aside from posting links to words, audio, video an illustration, or engaging in conversation about their work, authors have come up with clever ways to promote wheat they’re doing to wider audiences. From cross-promotion with other content-makers to character naming rights, a lot of these methods are both free and engaging to their fan communities. And because book promotion is so often self-promotion, many authors bring the audience along when they have success; announcing book deals, reprints of past works, and even movie options. These events are not merely a press release for the author, but a cause for celebration in their fandoms and communities of social media followers. In this way, the reader’s early faith in an author is vindicated, and fans are more likely to spread the word far beyond their own social media networks that they know someone who as written a great book. And it’s available at a bookstore, web site or multiplex near you!

In the past few months, though, I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed by these homegrown publicity machines. If you’re already a part of a community where authors “work the room” a lot, you will have read or heard their messages and their success stories many times over. You’ll know not only that book x has been added to Amazon’s catalog, but that it’s improved in sales rank by 500 places in the past day. And the author’s success will be amplified again and a gain by friends sending “congrats” via Twitter and Facebook. Great stuff for the author, but grounds for me to say “enough already” even if I’m a supportive fan.

The challenge is for the author: how much is too much, and how can you make that determination in a world where the milestones you achieve are magnified many times over by your community of friends and fans? I’ve written a lot of books myself, and I don’t mind telling you that I would have LOVED to have access to social media tools when I published them between 1997 and 2005. But the point at which you begin overloading your fans, tempting them to unfollow you, and making it hard for them to feel like hitting that Retweet button, is a place you don’t want to be.

I tracked the story on Twitter, where I follow a local TV station and two newspapers. But I wasn’t able to put the timeline together until late in the day when I read a full account, posted on the TV station’s Web site. Aside from the fact that 140 character bursts aren’t much good when you’re trying to take a comprehensive view of multi-dimensional stories, it was also striking that this story, a crime story that took place in a rough neighborhood, and that featured the kind of violence that might affect people’s real lives, was not chronicled by on-site observers. No hashtags popped up. No grainy cell phone video appeared on uStream or blip.tv. In short, the Twitterati, so capable when it comes to covering movie openings, tech conferences and even the occasional airline delay, was utterly silent.

The next time you’re tempted to dance on the graves of newspapers, or even television stations with local news operations, ask yourself whether the work of your police department and those with whom they interact is newsworthy. And if it is, which iPhone-toting Twitterers will turn covering the police beat into a volunteer project or a business model.

Oh, and just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that social media geeks need to cover the police beat. That might not be the highest and best use of their skills. Rather, I’m saying that the police beat, along with a whole lot of other unsexy but essential beats, are best covered by professional journalists who don’t use words like “long tail” and “niche marketing”. We need them.

I’m thinking about this today because I’m working on a plan to cover a conference I’ll be attending this summer. Tales of the Cocktail is an annual event for bartenders, beverage professionals, and cocktail enthusiasts, held in New Orleans.

I say “cover” because, as a long-time journalist (and proud of it) that’s how I view events that I attend. I see my attendance as a way to bring information, context,and energy to people who can’t attend themselves. that mindset is in my DNA. I want to tell people what happened, how it felt to be in the room, and who made what kinds of impacts on or within the audience. Frankly, I’m still working on the interactive part; how, using social media tools, can I let my audience influence my coverage, ask questions, give me feedback?

So much of what passes for social media coverage of events is poorly thought-out or lazy. Pointing a camera at a speaker, or lieblogging a seminar on Twitter feels great in the moment, but how, six months later, can content consumers process hours and hours of video, or Twitter posts which, if archived at all, lack real context outside the instant they occurred? I want the work I do in July to stand on its own in December, and also be consumable by busy people who wouldn’t have time to sit and watch old seminar sessions. I want what I do to inform people who attend the conference the following year, or discuss and write about its topics between events. You know, kind of like those old-fashioned things called news and feature articles used to provide a record that people could rely on for reference.

My idea right now is to combine liveblogging with edited audio podcasts. My version of liveblogging will be more like note-taking than instant news reporting. After all, this isn’t an Apple product announcement, with readers hanging on every word I write. From the liveblog posts, which can stay up for anyone who needs that level of detail, I can construct more orderly “permanent” stories that place what I’ve seen, heard and experienced into some kind of context.

Podcasting, which will always be my medium of choice, gives me the ability to record both the voices of speakers and fellow attendees, and my own. I’m likely to roll a lot of tape, then edit what I collect into manageable audio pieces that can be released one or two per day during the event. If all goes well, I might do shorter, more frequent live-to-tape podcasts consisting of interviews, or cocktail tasting notes. These could be aggregated into their own feed for people who are comfortable consuming a lot of audio in bit-sized chunks.

These are preliminary ideas. I know from attending Tales last year that it offers ample opportunity for learning, and for sensory overload. My challenge is to distill (yeah, that’s what I said) what I see and hear in ways that make it valuable to readers and listeners, both in real-time, and after the fact.

The camp environment, where people choose the topics they want to address and learn about, and in which interaction is prized, is especially exciting in a field where lots of people have limited information, but where good will abundant. In short, most folks embrace the idea of accessibility, but few understand it, orhow to make it happen. And the experts in what’s needed, my fellow disabled citizens, often lack other forums in which to discuss the topic.

Right now, I’m watching on uStream, very happy to have a window into what’s going on in San Antonio, and happy that I was in the right Twitter place at the right Twitter time. Many others who surely could have benefited, were not.

Before I go on, let me acknowledge those who had the idea for AccessCamp. It is a lot easier to provide critical feedback than it is to organize such an event. I offer what follows in a spirit of good will, and I have every intention of being a part of any future AccessCamps held in central Texas.

A few folks at AccesCamp have asked the organizers what efforts were made to get disabled people involved in the event. The response was that most unconference events are publicized via social media and that there is no budget for more traditional publicity. What I take from this is that the unconference movement, grassroots though it may be, relies too heavily on the social media tools its proponents use daily, and the networks of people they are connected to there. Twitter and Facebook may be the currency of the realm in social media circles, but they are more casual information sources for many disabled people, even those who have email and Web access at their fingertips. Also, I wonder how many unconference enthusiasts can say that their social media networks include numbers of disabled people, as mine does. Disabled social media users are out there, but, like all of us, they tend to find those with similar interests and perspectives. And because they are often marginalized in the work world, the average social media enthusiast tends either not to know any, or not to be adept at seeking them out.

Being a constant social media user does not automatically make you the ideal attendee for an uncomference. That ideal attendee may, for example, participate in mailing lists, Web forums, or live chats, but may not have bothered to acquire a Twitter account. We always risk talking only to the people we know in the social media world, and the AccessCamp experience is for me, an amplified example of that risk.

How to make things better? The AccessCamp organizers are right to remind us all that unconferences do not descend, fully-formed, from on high. They are built by those with a passion for “the movement” and a knowledge of how such events should be organized. If, however, you’re unconfernecing about topics that profoundly affect people to whom you are not personally connected, and whose issues you do not fully understand, it’s important to reach out; to find people outside your own network who can make connections directly to individuals and organizations who require accessibility to get their work done on a daily basis.

Those folks will be invaluable advisors and leaders, as well as attendees. You can find them with a minimal amount of research.
They will remind you that your chosen facility needs ramps, accessible bathrooms, greeters who can guide folks to meeting rooms, transit access, a place on the wiki for rideshare planning, walkable access to lunch spots, etc. They won’t be afraid to step up to volunteer their time and skills. But they need to hear from you first.